Beach Ice BW

 

This blog post will talk about two aspects of this poem both of which relate to choices made in the making of the video as well.  

 

The first is this is an ekphrastic poem. Ekphrasis, Poetry Foundation tells us, is: 

 

“Description” in Greek. An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.

 

This poem is a response to a photograph I took of a winter scene in Port Dover Ontario. Often in ekphrasis we are responding to someone else’s art. It actually can be any art form involved in either the subject or the art chosen to do the response. But there is a long history of ekphrastic poetry, perhaps because poetry is often digging for what’s underneath the words, and images are so inherent to the art form of poetry that it’s a natural medium for this type of response to other’s work.  

 

Continue reading “Black and White Image…. – Ekphrastic Poem”

 

This is the first video I’ve made for the Canada Council’s Digitals Originals program. My plan is to release about a dozen of these over the next three months.  The goal is to provide an experience of my new collection, Moving to Climate Change Hours published by Wolsak and Wynn, through a video gallery of selected poems. As well I will provide a blog post discussing each poem, its poetics and something around my thinking in the making of the video for the video gallery. 

 

The poem On Leaving was written after hearing a discussion on the use of steep enjambment in poetry. Poetry Foundation gives us this definition of enjambment: “The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation”. Or another way to think of it is the line ends in the middle of a phrase with the continuation being enjambment on to the next line. 

Continue reading “On Leaving – 1st Video Gallery Poem”

berries

Canada Council for the Arts

I heard yesterday about my grant application for Canada Council for the Arts’ Digital Originals program.  I applied for this a while ago, the program is “to help artists, groups and arts organizations pivot their work for online audiences during the COVID-19“. It’s $5000, what they a call a micro innovation grant and they are giving out something like 200 of them, so a million dollars over all. 

I saw a Facebook post a few months ago by another poet talking about missing a Canada Council grant deadline for something else.  And I thought, “hey, I should think about that”.  So I looked up what you have to do, the first step is being approved to be able to apply in terms of published work etc.  You submit the required material and then wait.  I was approved for literary writing so then started looking and saw that at the moment the only thing I could apply for was the Digital Originals program. 

 

Continue reading “I Got Picked (please excuse the visual pun)”